Union Jack Vanilla Sponge

It was my friend Zoe's birthday, and she has a crazy obsession with union jacks so I thought I'd make her a heart shaped union jack cake:

Ingredients:

Even though I must own about 100 cake books, I still use my trusty My First Cookbook for any basic cake(but I always double it for lots of cake which is the best kind of cake), in this instance a Vanilla Sponge:

8oz self raising flour

8oz unsalted butter, softened

8oz caster sugar

4 eggs

2 tsp baking powder

a few drops of vanilla extract

6oz softened unsalted butter

12oz icing sugar

Milk

A few drops of red and blue food dye.

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 180C and grease tins, I used a silicone heart mould so I didn't need to grease anything.

2. Cream butter and sugar together slightly to ensure the butter is completely soft and smooth.

3. Sieve in flour and baking powder, add eggs and vanilla and stir with a wooden spoon until roughly mixed.

4. Mix with electric whisk for a few minutes until smooth and dropping off spoon, if it doesn't drop off the spoon add a dash of milk.

5. Spoon into tins/silicone mould and bake for about half an hour. Mine took almost fifty minutes because it was a deep mould full of mixture. Check it's cooked through by inserting a skewer into the middle, it should come out clean when it's cooked, and checking it's slightly coming away from the edges.

6. Turn out onto wire rack and leave to cool.

For the icing:

1. Mix butter in bowl to smooth and soften it fully

2. Sieve in icing sugar a little bit at a time, mixing inbetween until all incorporated.

3. Add a splash of milk.

4. Separate the icing into 3 bowls, with the most for the blue and the least for the white.

5. Dye the bowl with the most icing in blue and the middle amount red. Mine ended up a lighter blue and red than the actual union jack because I didn't want to affect the taste of the icing with too much dye however if you used gel food colouring this wouldn't be an issue. 

6. I recommend drawing out on paper the design before doing it! Pipe the red in the cross across the middle and the diagonally from each corner. Flatten it with a palette knife

7. Fill in the gaps with blue, dragging the knife outwards to create a jagged effect. 

8. Edge each red bit with white using a smaller piping nozzle and then flattening that. In hindsight I would have covered the whole bottom with blue, then piped red over the top and then edged it with white however I quite liked the messy jagged look that I eventually ended up with. 

I had to cut the top off because it had risen and
 I needed it to be flat as I was icing the other side.  

Using the silicone mould meant I didn't have to grease anything, it was so easy to get onto the wire rack and it forms a sort of sugar crust which I think is delicious and means that you can pick it up without worrying about it crumbling :)

- Ellie x